I've seen a particularly bad case of contract breaking in Splinter Cell: Conviction this morning.

If I am hiding in COMPLETE DARKNESS, nothing near me at all, and shoot out a light halfway across the map, how do I get detected? I understand if they get an idea of my location. But I got full on "Mission Failed" detected in Infiltration (kill a buncha dudes without being detected, even once) mode, from shooting out a light with a silenced pistol.

A stealth game shouldn't count you as detected until visual or audio confirmation of your exact location.

Far Cry, which was mentioned in the article, also had serious issues with the rules of stealth, namely line of sight. Enemies can see you through all that damn foliage. But I can't see shit because of a few leaves in my first person view. Which is pretty much your problem. You had to peek out from the leaves of magical stealth, and the enemy saw you, and shot you dead immediately.

Similar example from many of the Worms games. The computer could calculate using the exact wind speed and power needed to land a grenade or missile right on top of you. In contrast, it would take a skilled player a few turns to fine tune it to that point, and even then they a. can't read the wind accurately enough and b. can't time their power buildup finely enough.

Neat article. Far Cry feels a bit cheap sometimes yeah. Far Cry 2 on the other hand plays with the 'social contract' of get-better-guns progression that you mentioned. Loads of the usual types of gun are available to you so long as you kill the right person to get it. Eh-kays, Blunderbuss, Jet Fuelled Bomb Launcher, et cetera. But the enemies guns aren't well looked after and jam if you use them often. Initially this gives you the old 'Computer is a Cheating Bastard' feeling but then the game offers you the chance to buy a special non-jamming version of the gun, which you can pick up in any safehouse. Viola! The social contract is reformed.

Eventually, after buying all the personalised non-jammy weapons, you tend to only use the faulty enemy guns in emergencies, adding to that great stressed/excited feeling you get when playing games sometimes: "Don't jam... don't jam... Ohshitohshitohshitohshit - yes! Phew." Pretty cool game design methinks.

Are any Games writers more than casual gamers? I don't know anyone who had problems with Far Cry. Your relative power DOES increase in Oblivion even though the monsters level up with you. At end game you can knock the shit out of anything no matter how much health they have.

And Dragon Age Origins is meant to be a hard game. Luck is a factor in some fights but this only hones your strategy generally so you're ready for every fight to be a tough one. By the endgame your strategy is so honed by the unpredicatability aspect you shouldn't suffer a single death unless you make a mistake. Or you could turn it down to easy.

GunboatDiplomat:Are any Games writers more than casual gamers? I don't know anyone who had problems with Far Cry. Your relative power DOES increase in Oblivion even though the monsters level up with you. At end game you can knock the shit out of anything no matter how much health they have.

And Dragon Age Origins is meant to be a hard game. Luck is a factor in some fights but this only hones your strategy generally so you're ready for every fight to be a tough one. By the endgame your strategy is so honed by the unpredicatability aspect you shouldn't suffer a single death unless you make a mistake. Or you could turn it down to easy.

Otherwise the articles ok as far as it goes.

Granted, by the end of Oblivion you are decked out and able to kill most anything just by thinking about it, but for the vast majority of the game (I would argue easily the whole main quest plus a good half of the rest of the content) the NPCs keep pace with you. It's frustrating to come back to a dungeon you struggled in at level one and still struggle at level 10.

As for DA:O, it might be different on PC, but on the Xbox there were points where it was simply impossible to avoid a death. The battle outside Orzamar in particular was the one that scuppered me. As it was the first time I entered that area, but late in the level progression the NPCs had a lot of stun abilities but I had not been able to get the anti-stun potion. I don't doubt that some of this is due to the consoles' control system. ("What do you mean I can't order my party to go to different positions at the same time?")

GunboatDiplomat:Are any Games writers more than casual gamers? I don't know anyone who had problems with Far Cry. Your relative power DOES increase in Oblivion even though the monsters level up with you. At end game you can knock the shit out of anything no matter how much health they have.

And Dragon Age Origins is meant to be a hard game. Luck is a factor in some fights but this only hones your strategy generally so you're ready for every fight to be a tough one. By the endgame your strategy is so honed by the unpredicatability aspect you shouldn't suffer a single death unless you make a mistake. Or you could turn it down to easy.

Otherwise the articles ok as far as it goes.

Granted, by the end of Oblivion you are decked out and able to kill most anything just by thinking about it, but for the vast majority of the game (I would argue easily the whole main quest plus a good half of the rest of the content) the NPCs keep pace with you. It's frustrating to come back to a dungeon you struggled in at level one and still struggle at level 10.

As for DA:O, it might be different on PC, but on the Xbox there were points where it was simply impossible to avoid a death. The battle outside Orzamar in particular was the one that scuppered me. As it was the first time I entered that area, but late in the level progression the NPCs had a lot of stun abilities but I had not been able to get the anti-stun potion. I don't doubt that some of this is due to the consoles' control system. ("What do you mean I can't order my party to go to different positions at the same time?")

With DA:O I was playing on the PC and I must admit I did download the raven respec mod (thanksfully there is an in-game respec in the Awakenings expansion) which made changing strategy easier until I had the 'perfect' party setup (dps tank, arcane tank, dps rogue, cc/healer). And I did struggle with the first few levels of oblivion for sure, messing up my first character until I had to restart from scratch.

However I think your article is missing a point on the role of failure as an incentive for many, let say, more hardcore gamers. I would argue the social contract was not broken in either of DA:O or Oblivion because failure forced a rethink of strategy/build and thus a deeper understanding of combat mechanics OR there was an easy button you could press.

This is quite different to many FPS, where repeated failure is more annoying than anything else because there is a far more limited number of ways to succeed in an encounter than in an RPG. However I did not really experience this in Far Cry, probably because FPS are easier on the PC than a console generally.

With DA:O I was playing on the PC and I must admit I did download the raven respec mod (thanksfully there is an in-game respec in the Awakenings expansion) which made changing strategy easier until I had the 'perfect' party setup (dps tank, arcane tank, dps rogue, cc/healer). And I did struggle with the first few levels of oblivion for sure, messing up my first character until I had to restart from scratch.

However I think your article is missing a point on the role of failure as an incentive for many, let say, more hardcore gamers. I would argue the social contract was not broken in either of DA:O or Oblivion because failure forced a rethink of strategy/build and thus a deeper understanding of combat mechanics OR there was an easy button you could press.

This is quite different to many FPS, where repeated failure is more annoying than anything else because there is a far more limited number of ways to succeed in an encounter than in an RPG. However I did not really experience this in Far Cry, probably because FPS are easier on the PC than a console generally.

Perhaps it was poorly explained in the article, but I wasn't actually arguing that the stuns were a bad thing in DA:O. What I objected to was that it seemed too random when it used them. Either fight me tooth and nail, or go easy. Don't do one then the other. That's not satisfying. That's just making it obvious you're letting me win.

I don't object to some auto-levelling either. To stick to DA:O, it works well there, as the game generally levels with you, but throws some low level mooks at you later on to slaughter in droves. Perhaps Oblivion is just too slow in letting me get to that all-powerful-God-amongst-men stage for my tastes. Or I just suck at it. Either is possible.

And maybe Far Cry was subtly changed (other than controls) between PC and 360. I know it's not a straight port to account for the 360's hardware, so maybe something got broken in the move. Or maybe I just suck at it, too.

I understand the joy of failure though. I love me some raiding in my MMO of choice, even though I [b]definitely[b] suck at that!

Thanks. I think this explains in a nutshell at least five of the reasons why I seem to be one of the few people in the world who really didn't like System Shock 2. (Stop shooting me with empty, broken shotguns, dammit!)

God, that game comes with excellent immersion and character progression/devolepment. I remember when I was fresh out of the box literally, no weapons and no skills. I stuck to Megaton like it was my Life Draft. However, I always imagined myself growing and learning the ways of the Wasteland.

Devoleping, scavenging, knowing which areas are dangerous and which areas are not makes me believe I am a seasoned Wastelander. Together with Dogmeat, I share wisdom and advice to those who are benevolent and cap a bullet into the ass of any Raider. Also, Galaxy News Radio is the place to listen to.

I don't object to some auto-levelling either. To stick to DA:O, it works well there, as the game generally levels with you, but throws some low level mooks at you later on to slaughter in droves. Perhaps Oblivion is just too slow in letting me get to that all-powerful-God-amongst-men stage for my tastes. Or I just suck at it. Either is possible.

Why revise your statement? You were correct the first time.

Everything levels up with you. Leveling in itself actually makes your PC WEAKER compared to the NPCs and it is only through Optimized Leveling and playing against the major skills that you can get ahead (or through underleveling if you want to abuse the system).

It's the perfect example of breaking the contract and of poor game design.

Great article all around. Too many game designers forget that us gamers feel cheated when the computer pulls a dick move like shooting us in the head with a pistol from across the map or the well-known Mario Kart trick of warping the computer players up behind us even when we left them in our dust.

I don't know if "social contract" is the right phrase, though. I think "expectation" might be a better way of describing it. (Maybe they are the same thing?)

All of the expectations you mentioned are spot on. We expect the enemy, even if computer controlled, to be approximately as capable as us. They should be under the same limitations, including line of sight, steadiness, and reaction time. Anything less makes them uninteresting, anything more makes them unfair. Same thing for the boss fights: if a boss has 10 times as much health and multiple weapons, he had better have some sort of weak spot to make up for it. If not, how is the player ever supposed to win? An unbeatable game isn't fun at all: we expect that we are able to win with enough cunning and practice, otherwise there's no point to playing.

Randomness is also a huge one and one that drives me crazy. Dying due to random chance is terribly frustrating, because you've been punished for something that you couldn't control. Equally, winning due to random chance kills any sort of sense of achievement, because you know that it wasn't your own efforts that lead to the win. Randomness is good for keeping things different and for adding some dithering to a conflict so that even the underdog wins sometimes, but when it overshadows skill, you're not playing a game, you're playing a lottery.

The other expectation you mention is the tendency to improve in strength over time. I'm not sure that this is an expectation of games so much as an expectation of learning: we naturally measure our progression in terms of how much easier our past challenges become. If the same enemies are still just as difficult 10 hours later, I don't feel like I've improved; I can't immediately tell that the enemies have improved along with me. Without that yard stick to measure our progress against, we lose the reward mechanism that comes with learning a game.

One case you didn't mention is the pre-scripted death or escape. It's really disappointing to give it your all in a fight and lose, only to find out you were supposed to lose and never could have won. If I couldn't win, why was I trying? How do I know if I can win the next fight? It's cheating in the purest sense and it undermines the trust that gamers have that a game is beatable and therefore worth playing. Almost is bad is when you beat the bad guy, only for him to fly away. You worked so hard -- you won -- and yet you are denied the gratification. It's like playing a board game with somebody, and when you win, they tip the board over and say, "Nope, didn't happen, nobody won."

Gamers play games because they are challenges to be overcome. If there is no practical way to overcome them, then they aren't worth playing. Vice versa, if there is no challenge to overcome, they aren't worth playing. "Hard fun" is a delicate balance between the two where the challenge is one we know we can overcome, but it's going to take some effort.

@Brian: That does sound like a very nice workaround. A good mix of worldly realism and progression. Maybe I should give the franchise another shot.

You definitely should. The second game does still suffer a weeeee tinytinytiny bit from 'ghost jungle bullet syndrome' ("Somethin' just jumped up an' bit meh!") but it's a far better game than the original.

As for Dragon Age: Origins, I'm with you on that one. The randomness of difficulty just makes it frustrating sometimes, with deaths that really seem unfair at times. And it means you have to keep adjusting the difficulty setting to try and find a good balance. There should be a cream for that kind of irritation.

I really liked this article. In a way, it's all the things I ever felt about bullshit moments in videogames without really knowing why exactly I felt them. More than that, it makes me feel validated in those times when I complained about a game truly not being fair. I always felt like that was some kind of childish cop-out excuse for sucking, but in truth I could have just been dealing with some real unfairness all those times.

Excellent article. Such seemingly small things are why some games succeed and some games fail, and also why some games can be a hit with the sales, get high scores on every review, and be forgotten a year later. Now finding the precise point exactly between a breach of the social contract and needed suspension of disbelief, that's the tricky part.

IvanRosski:Great article old bean. But I simply must say, if you ever use the word "mom" again, I'm going to come round your gaffe and wrap your 360 right around your noggin.

The Random One:Excellent article. Such seemingly small things are why some games succeed and some games fail, and also why some games can be a hit with the sales, get high scores on every review, and be forgotten a year later. Now finding the precise point exactly between a breach of the social contract and needed suspension of disbelief, that's the tricky part.

IvanRosski:Great article old bean. But I simply must say, if you ever use the word "mom" again, I'm going to come round your gaffe and wrap your 360 right around your noggin.

Wow, your mother sounds really angry!

While Iain may be an old woman at times, he is NOT my mother! ;)

ReverseEngineered:I don't know if "social contract" is the right phrase, though. I think "expectation" might be a better way of describing it. (Maybe they are the same thing?)

You say "potato", I say "carbohydrate rich root crop of the genus Solanum"...

Joking (and academic tendencies to use overly complex language) aside, I think there is a difference. In my opinion, it comes down to the degree of upset that breaking the convention causes. Expectations are a little easier to break with. You just need to look at the sense of "the computer is cheating" type comments here to see that we do perceive these things as rules, rather than just conventions.

There's also something in the social contract idea that implies two-way traffic. Although I didn't talk about our obligations as gamers as much, we do give as well as take in this relationship. (And not just in monetary terms.) Suspension of disbelief is one, but other things, like not being able to perform certain actions or allowing some degree of railroading is part of it too. How often have you thought "this would be much easier in real life" while playing a game? But we don't hold that against the game, because we understand, albeit subconsciously, that letting this slide this is our end of the bargain.

ajbell:As for DA:O, it might be different on PC, but on the Xbox there were points where it was simply impossible to avoid a death. The battle outside Orzamar in particular was the one that scuppered me. As it was the first time I entered that area, but late in the level progression the NPCs had a lot of stun abilities but I had not been able to get the anti-stun potion. I don't doubt that some of this is due to the consoles' control system. ("What do you mean I can't order my party to go to different positions at the same time?")

Sadly, I'd say that the PC version had this problem as well. Just like yourself, I got stuck in Orzammar. The bosses were unfairly difficult, mainly because they require a great deal of item preparation by levelling and using Herbalism (which I had somehow avoided doing until then). In the fight with the dwarven thieves I died unreasonably and repetitiously, simply because the tactics used varied so much, and were layered so thickly on top of pure brute strength, that even multiple tries could not get me through. Thus, Dragon Age: Origins joined the one out of about two games that I decided not to finish.

Just as unfairly, I found that the game didn't cater to all class type players. I chose to be a dual-blade warrior at the start, assuming that I would have just as much chance of beating the game as anyone else (as the social contract from other games had me believing). It turns out that these characters are just generally the worst in the game, and even with three mages other than them around, you're not doing enough damage per second to beat some of the bosses. Not without using a mountain of potions, anyway.

I miss the days where games had cheat codes you could input if you were pretty desperate or just tired of being killed. A particular game perhaps too "hardcore" and you want to enjoy it without spending hours trying to get your strategy down? -- God Mode time. Feeling frustrated that you, in your far-too-human way, wasted all your ammo trying to kill an enemy that the hit detection seemed to only register 1-in-5 shots even though he's RIGHT THERE! -- Infinite Ammo.

I'll forgive a game for the occasional moment that things go utterly broken and I feel I'm being picked on, only if there are some fallback options to ensure that I can proceed. It can be setting the difficulty lower, or turning on auto-aim, turning up hit accuracy, or something, because if you're sitting there miserable, frustrated, hating the game and the AI to the point where you don't want to play anymore... then why are you playing?

..And that's pretty much everything I wanted to say with this post. I don't even agree with the Dragon Age-criticism somewhere on this page. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing more of your articles in future issues.

Onyx Oblivion:I've seen a particularly bad case of contract breaking in Splinter Cell: Conviction this morning.

If I am hiding in COMPLETE DARKNESS, nothing near me at all, and shoot out a light halfway across the map, how do I get detected? I understand if they get an idea of my location. But I got full on "Mission Failed" detected in Infiltration (kill a buncha dudes without being detected, even once) mode, from shooting out a light with a silenced pistol.

A stealth game shouldn't count you as detected until visual or audio confirmation of your exact location.

I'm not claiming to be a firearm expert in any way, shape, or form, but I can tell you that even with a silencer, pistols are LOUD. They don't make that *thwip* sound like they do in the movies, but a fairly sizable bang, not to mention the muzzle flash. In complete darkness, you would definitely give away your position.

Onyx Oblivion:I've seen a particularly bad case of contract breaking in Splinter Cell: Conviction this morning.

If I am hiding in COMPLETE DARKNESS, nothing near me at all, and shoot out a light halfway across the map, how do I get detected? I understand if they get an idea of my location. But I got full on "Mission Failed" detected in Infiltration (kill a buncha dudes without being detected, even once) mode, from shooting out a light with a silenced pistol.

A stealth game shouldn't count you as detected until visual or audio confirmation of your exact location.

I'm not claiming to be a firearm expert in any way, shape, or form, but I can tell you that even with a silencer, pistols are LOUD. They don't make that *thwip* sound like they do in the movies, but a fairly sizable bang, not to mention the muzzle flash. In complete darkness, you would definitely give away your position.

Hmm...Well, I figured as much in reality. But I was going on standard "game logic".

To all those saying they liked the article, you're very kind. Now, if any of you happen to know the Escapist editors/work for Themis Media/have any incriminating photos of Escapist staff do let them know... ;)

Onyx, I do agree that stealth logic is often pretty warped in games and does require a more serious than most other types of gameplay suspension of disbelief. I don't know if this is because we've got used to conventions that cropped up originally due to processing power limitations (such as the old "I'm standing in a patch of shadow in front of a brightly light wall, shouldn't my silhouette be blindingly obvious" problem) or some other reason. (Maybe genuine stealth gameplay isn't much fun?)

Oh, and I totally agree with ReverseEngineered's point about the scripted death/escape. It's the "your actions should make a difference" part of the social contract. (An earlier draft of this article had a section on how offering a choice, such as whether or not to deal aggressively in a conversation, but then providing the same result regardless was rendering that player input null and void. The magically escaping boss is a worse version of this, but thankfully somewhat rarer.)

EDIT: Heh, tried to post this during the first fifteen minutes of a new ZP being up. Must have taken longer loading the forums than writing the damn post!

The background denotes FarCry 2, which I've never played, but I've heard people rage about the enemy aim in FarCry 1 before and I just want you all to know that hiding in bushes is like this magical aegis that protects you from all view [and consequently fire] until the enemy is like 5' away. So that's kind of a remedy to the breaking of the contract.

And Oblivion gets a pass in my book [and probably a lot of gamers books] due to the immersion factor. My biggest related gripe is that there are so few enemy models. This seems to allow them to be a little underhanded and just have the same enemies level with you, so that at max level you're still shooting giant ants [Fallout] and rats, but they're just harder. The games make up for this with immersion and cooler ways to kill the enemies. So perhaps my stats aren't noticeably up like in a JRPG or MMORPG, but my methods are.

And something that's occurred to me that undermines RPG's 'you get stronger' MO entirely is that the enemies must get harder in order to maintain a challenge, but at the same time the enemies getting stronger just means all your statistics boosts are essentially irrelevant. This is daunting, because if we take out the new enemy skins/models essentially you're playing the exact same boring fights for 30+ hours. -The entire idea of the RPG is to get stronger and then lord it over all the peasants [or in MMORPG's case, the new players]. But we know action would get old quick if you one-shot every enemy you came across.

--Oh, and imo the most notorious social contract breakers are fighting games. I can't really blame them for it because it's probably damn hard to program AI that fights back in a realistic fashion, but once you get to higher difficulties or end bosses you'll notice that most fighters just dodge all your hits, break all your throws, and throw cheap shots.

And as long as I'm thinking of contract offenders; Crysis. I play a ton of this game, the gameplay's great, the graphics are great, it's one of the few modern shooters that doesn't require me to go online with other howling loonies.

But they need to do something about object physics. If a barrel explodes and a barrel next to it happens to fly my way and hit me, I die. Realistic right? I imagine that this same programming is the cause of me bumping a box with another box on it while I'm running, the box on top falls over and KILLS ME. I agree this is kind of minor in a game that has checkpoints every 1:30, but if you've set some arbitrary goal like beating a level without dying then it's a real pain.

I agree with the strange randomness as found in DA:O. I love the game but for me it was that spell that rapidly drains your life while at the same time preventing you from healing yourself. I hated that spell with a passion and it made some fights excrutiatingly tough (though I'll admit never mucking around to see if I could find an antidote) and then, all of sudden, that one fight that was ticking me off would go by without the enemies using it at all.

One of my biggest pet peeves on this topic is rubber banding in racing games (or in racing events in non-racing games). I'm sorry but if I run the race perfectly from start to finish, including seeing the AI totally wipe out at some point in time, they shouldn't be right up trying to pass me at the finish line. That's just garbage and is such an obvious crutch that it kills any enjoyment I have when it comes to games that fall back on it. It's almost hilarious how bad this is in Mario Kart because you can actually see your competitors locations on the mini-map.. you actually see that one person who is designated as your rival zipping around at a literally impossible rate of speed if they happen to fall too far behind.

My other big pet peeve is fighting game AI. Mortal Kombat is probably the worst for it, but Street Fighter has a few examples too (oh, and SNK's bosses deserve a special place in hell for this). I understand that making good fighting game AI would be difficult without making it trivial or just too random to in any way approximate a real player, but sometimes (like in MK) it's beyond stupid. An AI character should not be able to "anticipate" my attacks 100% of the time. They shouldn't be able to perfect;y counter anything I'm doing before the first frame of my move has even registered on screen. Ken and Akuma in some of the Street Fighter games are a perfect example of this. They walk towards you. You throw a fireball, they jump before you even start the throwing animation. You try an attack, they dragon punch it with inhuman timing. You wait, they throw you as soon as they get one pixel into throwing range.

Forgist? You've lost me there. "Social contract" is an established social/philisophical/political term for agreed behaviours in a society. The impossible things are (at least as far as I know them) a Douglas Adams quote. ("Done seven impossible things before breakfast? Then why not visit Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!")

The bad AI in Farcry 2 is more a case of bad programming than badly AI-design.

I had an excellent time playing this game, and the AI behaved fair (and is today one of my favorite FP Shooters because of the AI, the weapons and the enviroment). But seing my friend play it on another computer, he was spotted 1km away in an instant, and he couldnt hide in bushes.Playing both the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, it was totally opposite, my friend could hide in bushes or dark or sneak up behind them, i was spotted trough bushes and cover, in total darkness, no mercy...

I guess the AI is better the more CPU (or the less CPU or something), because i have a crappy computer while he has a computer who can play the latest games on average settings.